One Novelist’s Great Evolution

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Many novelists—including some great ones—circle one subject and style for much of their career. Colson Whitehead isn’t among them. He has written a zombie novel, a fantastical escape-from-slavery narrative, a supernatural elevator-inspector thriller, and, most recently, a trilogy of heist capers that concludes with Cool Machine, which comes out on Tuesday. The critic David Hajdu, in a…